The dark corners of libraries, government files and science labs around the world, apparently - with a little bit of human quirk thrown in for good measure.

Wolfram Alpha, the so-called "computational knowledge engine" that launched this week, claims to have access to a vast repository of information from trusted sources around the world: 10tn pieces of data filtered through 50,000 models and algorithms. Those numbers represent an enormous catalogue of information, but while the stats are impressive, it's easy to be bamboozled: what do they really mean?

At the heart of Alpha lies Mathematica, a piece of software that's wildly popular with engineers and scientists. It was designed by Alpha's author, the British physicist Stephen Wolfram, and crunches data from its users that Alpha is then able to spit back out again to web searchers. As well as their computational relationship, both systems can also pull answers from a range of approved references, databases and documents.

To give you a taste of where Wolfram Alpha gets its facts from, a few searches threw up the CIA's World Factbook, the United States Geological Survey, a Cornell University Library publication called All About Birds, Chambers Biographical Dictionary, Dow Jones, the Catalogue of Life and the ever-present "Wolfram Alpha curated data".

Some of the references come, Google-style, from ordinary websites but most of the information is drawn from the texts and databases that are pulled into Mathematica, which performs most of the numerical calculations. This means Alpha is strong on science and maths but struggles with some other fact-based disciplines (such as history) and seems nonplussed by social sciences and popular culture. There are plenty of queries that result in the weary (and wearying) refrain of "Wolfram Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input".

However, the search engine is not just pulling information from academic data: it has its fair share of oddball references too - injected by the site's staff in an attempt to draw a smile from users and build up early-adopter credibility.

What else can explain the decision to express speed in terms of Back to the Future? Anyone searching for the top speed of a cheetah is presented with the fact that it can run at three quarters of the speed required for the Doc's DeLorean to achieve time travel.

Still, the laborious task of examining and approving every possible source cannot carry on forever. The site has already said it will encourage users to vote on what they think is best in an ad hoc, crowdsourced set of eyes that informs the site's programmers.

In the end, that's not necessarily much different or better than the information returned from a search on Google or Wikipedia. Perhaps Wolfram Alpha isn't quite so revolutionary after all.